Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Was It for This: Poems

Was It for This: Poems

Sullivan, Hannah

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $17.00

ISBN10: 0374612862
ISBN13: 9780374612863
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Jan 9 2024
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.36
Height: 0.31 Width: 5.38 Depth: 8.25
Language: English

A hybrid new collection from the author of Three Poems--about London, terror, new motherhood, the Grenfell Tower fire, and how we live now.

Hannah Sullivan's first collection, Three Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book's project, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time.

But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic event and present disaster. Tenants, the first poem, is an elegy for Grenfell, written from the uneasy perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting.

Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, from the thin concrete pillars of a flyover to an elderly peacock's broken train. There is a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.

Also from

Sullivan, Hannah

View All

Also in

General Poetry

View All